Thread by @GenesysGo

That moment when it all clicks into place... love to see it!
The remaining piece is making sure that #Solana files stored on $SHDW drive are...
#1: Validated via a consensus mechanism.
#2: Permanently Stored and immutable if that's what the user desires.

https://twitter.com/Nelis_sol/status/1504509122271662081

For #1... we already have an amazing consensus mechanism at our disposal... #Solana.
Therefore, ensuring that the uploaded data was stored correctly and hasn't been altered becomes a "simple" matter of integrating the validator network into the upload process.

As I've said before... $SHDW Drive isn't looking to reinvent the wheel here... #Solana already has a great consensus mechanism. As much as we love a good nerd quest, we love even more pushing out infra that works incredibly well.

As for #2... Permanent and immutable storage is a lot like blockchain... decentralization is the key.
There is a critical mass in which enough independent operators and enough replications of a the data make it impossible for a bad actor to manipulate data w/o a super majority.

To this end, a piece of the overall architecture of $SHDW Drive is a decentralized network of monitor nodes that run consensus voting on the integrity of the data that's stored. This internal consensus voting is then validated by the #Solana validator network.

That said, one thing we think other decentralized storage options don't go far enough to embrace web3 in our opinion... we want $SHDW Drive to democratize not just access to storage but also ownership of the storage.

$SHDW Drive employs a staking contract through which users needing storage will stake SHDW to gain access to the needed amount of storage.
Staked SHDW effectively claims your ownership of that piece of storage.
However, let's say you need less storage one day? Unstake some SHDW.

Let's say you need more storage one day? Stake additional $SHDW.
The important thing for us is to acknowledge that not all data needs to be stored for forever... data analytics tools or data indexing projects can stake/unstake SHDW as their caching needs change.

Now, after all this context... lemme circle back to #2... permanent and immutable storage being a choice... for use cases, like #SolanaNFTs, that require forever storage... an additional $SHDW Drive command locks the stake in forever and thus crates immutable perma-storage.

As a side note... this can turn into a possible indicator for whether a #NFT project is a rug or not. Are they using $SHDW Drive? Yes? Did they perma-stake in order to ensure the immutability of their data? Cool.
With a huge % of NFT metadata stored on AWS, this is crucial.

The reason we're excited about this approach is because it is not a zero sum game like the legacy world... if I pay AWS to store my data then I need to make sure I can make more money than I am paying AWS in order to make this worthwhile.

However, in web3 there are many new tools we can use to drive some innovation forward! Staking, being the primary one we're utilizing at this time.
So, hypothetically, the overall demand for $SHDW goes up as the usage of SHDW Drive increases!

At the same time, how successful $SHDW Drive actually is on a day to day basis (i.e. how well GenGo does their job in terms of building something easy to use, performant, and reliable) can be measured by how much $SHDW is being unstaked.

Put simply, if $SHDW Drive is awesome and the #Solana community loves it then the amount of staked SHDW will see an uptrend over time.
If we roll out SHDW Drive and it's terrible then I would expect a spike in staked SHDW but then a downtrend over time. #transparency #visibility

Employing a staking mechanism also creates some rly interesting possibilities... by staking you are claiming ownership of that portion of storage. Again, web3 is all about access and ownership.
Perhaps you don't use it to store your own files? Perhaps you lease it out?

We're very much building $SHDW Drive with the mindset that we want it to be built *on top of* by the #Solana community. Five years from now we don't want it to be just another storage option, we want it to be a backbone for something greater... all fundamentally powered by $SHDW

As far as the costs go, when you include all the hidden costs that services like AWS or Google Cloud charge you (bandwidth, number of queries, etc) we're coming in significantly cheaper. This is part of the benefit of building *into* our RPC network rather than seperately 😊

When you compare us to Arweave, we'll be 30-40% cheaper (this number is easier to give an exact figure on since Arweave charges a flat amount of AR tokens for storage and assumes bandwidth costs are paid for by machine operators...